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Good morning. Dress, refresh! Bring on sunshine! Suddenly my inbox is full of suggestions from clothes retailers for going out and about. A floaty midi-dress for her? Smart, redefined, casual for him? It won’t do any more to yawn your way to a screen in your track suit bottoms. You may even be going back to The Office. I have my first big social event for fourteen months tomorrow. When I opened my cupboard I was staring at garments I had forgotten I had. Yesterday on Thought on For the Day Vishvipani spoke of our kinship with animals. But clothes seem unique to humans, so much so that I often wonder, when I am dressing in the presence of the cat, what on earth he thinks is going on. Are these pieces of fabric I swathe around myself a kind of detachable fur, or are human beings just underendowed in the skin department? We are, after all, born naked and immediately wrapped around for protection. But perhaps, apart from warmth and protection clothes are a mere convention and we are most truly and gloriously ourselves when we have nothing on. Look at the way Greek and Roman sculpture exults in the unclothed human form. Alright, these stone bodies are carved to be perfect. In a conventionally gendered way, the men have strong, developed muscles, while the women are soft and curvaceous. Yet in real life taking our clothes off is a bit more complicated. Nakedness still produces titters, in spite of the earnestness of naturists. And the embarrassment is surely that with nakedness comes vulnerability, something we are only willing to share with those we most desire and trust. If this is true then dressing becomes a kind of aspiration. The way we dress tells others more about ourselves than our naked bodies. Clothes advertise not only who we are but what we are for. Overalls are a message, so is a suit, so is a clerical collar. Dress communicates whether you can afford designer style or are just extremely canny at putting a look together from charity shops. It’s why many of us have grown a bit tired of our lockdown look and are ready to emerge into company. You might think that the Bible condemns an interest in clothes as vanity, but it is not quite true. Adam and Eve are clothed by God when they leave paradise. The people of Israel are summoned to Mount Sinai in raiment of beauty and glory. And St Paul speaks of being clothed with the garments of salvation and the robes of righteousness. As we start to going out again we should remember that humans are an unfinished project. We dress not only to declare who we are but to reveal who we are becoming.